Gap Creek (26 page)

It was too far to walk to the north side of the ridge, but I found some turkey’s paw in a dark place above the maple swamp. There was a small bed of it just below a laurel thicket and I pulled five or six strings out of the leaves like I was unlacing or pulling out thread. Holly was easier to find, for there was a tree with berries on it in the maple swamp just below the laurel thicket. I broke off several limbs and headed back to the house. When I come to the cut tree I took the white pine by one of its lower limbs and drug it across the pasture. The clouds was thick and dark by the time I got everything to the house. It looked like it was going to snow, but I didn’t think it was cold enough.

WHEN HANK SEEN the tree the first thing he said was, “That thing is lopsided as a goose.” I thought about saying You could have got one
yourself, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to make him even more moody. It wouldn’t be Christmas without a tree, and I had got the prettiest one in the field.

Hank sawed out four sections of a plank and nailed them to the bottom of the pine to make a stand. We put the tree in the corner of the living room so the hollow place didn’t show. I strung the strands of turkey’s paw over the doors and along the mantel. And I put holly in vases on the mantel and on the table.

“Don’t see any reason to make such a fuss,” Hank said. “This house ain’t even ours.”

“It’s ours for the time being,” I said.

“I don’t feel much like celebrating,” Hank said.

“I know you don’t,” I said. Hank was like Ma Richards. He looked at things in the hardest way and said things in the harshest way. I was glad I had decided to celebrate Christmas. If you waited till everything was perfect to celebrate, you might never celebrate anything. I would try to act like things was going to turn out all right, and it just might happen. I had to make a house for me and Hank, and the baby.

I had looked in the closets and in the attic for Christmas decorations that Mrs. Pendergast might have had. The only thing I found was one glass ball that must have hung on a Christmas tree years ago. I brought it downstairs and tied it to a limb of the pine tree.

It was up to me to think of decorations. There had to be a candle on the tree. I fixed up a holder out of wire and put a candle on the very top.

There was some sheets of tinfoil in the kitchen, and I sliced them with the scissors and hung the strips on the tree to look like icicles. The strips glittered in the firelight and in the candlelight. Next I popped a bunch of Mama’s popcorn and strung it on threads, which I wrapped around the tree. Last I cut some angels out of the pages of a magazine and hung them on the limbs.

With the candle lit on the top, the tree really did make the room look like Christmas. I set down by the fire and just looked at the tree, I was so proud I had got it done.

When Hank come in with an armload of wood I hoped he would say something about the tree. But instead he announced it was starting to sleet. I run to the door and looked out. Sure enough, there was white on top of the fence posts and on the fence wire, on the boxwoods and on the trees across the creek. The limbs of the arborvitae was beginning to droop like they was weighted with lead. Icicles stretched along the eaves and hung from the clothesline.

I had been hoping for snow on Christmas, and instead it was coming an ice storm. It was getting dark, but everything outside appeared to glow with the ice on it.

“The road up the mountain will be slick as glass,” Hank said.

“Do you think it’ll turn to snow?” I said. I wanted to see a white Christmas.

“Sleet always turns to rain,” Hank said.

“Why is that?” I said.

“It always warms up after a sleet,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

I FIXED SUPPER and we eat quiet. In the house you couldn’t tell it was sleeting. It’s almost never windy during a sleet. Sleet is like the most gentle rain that don’t run off and don’t drip and patter on the roof or windows. A sleet is silent because the fine droplets turn to ice as soon as they touch. Sleet attaches itself to everything and thickens like coats of paint, and you don’t hear it. We eat warmed-over turkey and cornbread and gravy, and you wouldn’t have thought anything was going on outside.

It was later, as we was setting by the fireplace, that we heard the first pop and crash. I couldn’t tell exactly what direction it come from.

“Was that an apple tree?” I said.

“Most likely an arborvitae,” Hank said. “Sleet is heaviest on evergreens.”

“Hope it don’t fall on the house,” I said. Pretty soon we heard another pop and crash, but this time from farther away.

After we went to bed I heard a crack in the woods across the creek, like a rifle had been fired. Limbs was breaking all over the woods, and the tops of trees was snapping with the weight of ice. The house groaned and creaked with the load of ice on the roof. Everything was heavy as if it was wearing armor. I hoped the barn didn’t crash down on top of the horse and cow.

After we went to sleep I was awakened by a crack and a whoosh, as a tree on the mountain broke and fell. I hated to think of all the hemlocks and pines that was falling. The woods would have gaps and roads would be blocked by knocked-down trees. The sleet was doing its work in the dark. There was so many pops on the ridges above it sounded like somebody was hunting or starting a war. Even after I went back to sleep I heard in my dream a boom, and then another boom. I dreamed the trees was skeletons of ice breaking up into little bones as they walked in the glare of lightning.

But by the time we woke in the morning the popping and creaking had stopped. It was still dark when I got up to start a fire in the kitchen stove. As I laid in the kindling and cobs, I heard the dripping from the eaves, like all the ice was melting. And it did feel a little warmer, though the air was so damp the chill soaked into your bones.

When I opened the door to get more wood off the back porch I heard the rain. It was a quiet steady rain. The yard was a sheet of ice, but grooved where runoff had started melting it. “Didn’t I say it would warm up?” Hank said as he took the bucket out to milk.

“You sure did,” I said.

“Too late to do the trees any good,” he said.

After daylight we could see the trees down along the edge of the pasture and across the road. The ridge above the creek looked like it had been hacked with a mowing blade in places. There was still ice on the trees on top of the mountain. But in the valley most of the sleet was gone. There was only the broke trees, and the limbs laying everywhere, to show what a sleet had passed in the dark.

It was the day before Christmas and I had hoped to get outside and look for some ivy to string along the mantel and doorways with the turkey’s paw. And if I couldn’t find ivy I would gather galax, for I had seen a whole bed of galax on the ridge below the laurel thicket.

But all day the rain kept on. I expected it to slack off and the sun to come out. But instead it rained harder. It was a steady straight-down rain. Water stood in pools in the yard and the pasture looked more like a lake, or a bunch of little lakes. It was so wet the horse didn’t want to go outside, and the cow stayed close to the overhang of the stall. Hank got soaked just carrying in wood from the shed.

“Creek’s getting up,” he said.

I walked to the living room and looked out the window. The creek was an ugly red and frothed high between its banks. Where it rushed against a log, the creek water seemed to clap its hands and reach out for the weeds along the bank.

“We could have a flash flood,” I said.

“We’re already having a flash tide,” Hank said.

IT RAINED ALL day, never a lashing, harsh rain, but steady rain that filled every bucket and tub and sinkhole. The yard looked like a garden growing necks and blossoms of splash. The road looked like a creek, and the creek was running wild and red and wide as a river.
Floodwater appears angry because it’s dirty and goes where you don’t expect to see water. All the ice on the mountain had melted far up as I could see. “The barn is leaking,” Hank said when he come in from milking.

“No wonder,” I said.

And when I started to make supper, lighting a fire in the stove and grinding up some of the chestnuts gathered by Hank and Carolyn to make chestnut bread, I heard a plop in the corner of the kitchen. I took the lamp and looked and seen a puddle on the floor. I raised the lamp and seen a nipple of water stretching from a wet spot on the ceiling. Wasn’t nothing to do but put a dishpan under the drip and mop up the mess on the floor. Before I got the chestnut bread mixed and in the oven, I heard another drip and got a bucket and put under that. And while I was getting the bread and grits and applesauce and sidemeat on the table, I seen the wet streaks coming down the wall behind the stove. It was leaking around the flue. It looked like the whole house was going to melt.

“Not supposed to come a flood on Christmas,” Hank said when we set down to eat. “Nobody ever heard of a flood on Christmas.”

“That’s because we’ve always lived on mountaintops before,” I said. And even as I said it I thought how narrow the Gap Creek valley was and how steep the ridges on both sides. We was below all the water that was falling on the mountains. All the rain on the mountains had to gather down into the slender valley.

“What does that mean?” Hank said.

“It just means we never had to worry about floods because we lived on the ridge,” I said.

I don’t reckon Hank had thought about floods in Gap Creek until then. We had moved there in early fall when it was dry. The little creek had behaved itself, staying in the bed of rocks that run like rough cobblestones between the fields and woods, twisty as a playful
kitten. I could see by the look on his face how he thought for the first time of the narrowness of the valley and how close the house was to the creek.

“We are a good ways back from the creek,” I said.

“Not far enough,” Hank said.

I had hoped we would be feeling some Christmas cheer, but instead a wet, gray gloom had descended over us.

“If the creek rises we could climb up the mountain tomorrow and visit Mama and my sisters,” I said.

“If the creek rises we won’t be able to get out of the house without a boat,” Hank said. He said it like he was talking about the end of the world. He said it like Ma Richards would have said it, like there was no hope anywhere.

“This house has been here a long time,” I said. “It must have seen a lot of floods and not washed away yet.”

But Hank didn’t answer. He buried his face between his hands.

“Do you think we might ought to go on up the mountain tonight?” I said.

“We can’t leave the horse and cow here,” Hank said.

“We can take the horse,” I said. “And we can leave the cow if we have to.”

“I don’t think anything but a fish could travel in this rain,” Hank said.

When I went out to the back porch to get water to wash the dishes, it was raining hard as ever. In the dark you couldn’t see nothing but lamplight shining on falling drops. It was like the air was sheets and curtains of falling water. Rain was coming down in ropes and clots and tattered rags of water. It felt like the sky was falling and the weight of the rain was pushing everything down to the ground, down the hill, down the valley.

After I finished the dishes and went to set in the living room, we listened to the rain drumming on the roof. The rain was harder and
faster now. It sounded like an army marching over our heads, and it sounded like millstones rubbing each other. I heard a drip and seen water splash right on the hearth. It was leaking around the chimney. Hank got the ash bucket to put under the drip. “This house is going to fall apart like cardboard,” he said.

“It is not,” I said, trying to sound like the rain was a little thing. But looking out from the back porch into the steady rain had unnerved me too. In the dark it was like some force was coming out of the sky to drown us in the mud and flood. Whoever thought of an evil force coming from the sky? But it was like the air was threatening to smother us and crush us.

To work against the gloom I got up and lit the candle on top of the Christmas tree. The tree stood in the corner pointing up toward where all the rain was coming from. I thought of a description I had heard of the host of fallen angels being throwed out of heaven. The air was full of black angels falling in the dark, thick as snowflakes. Crowflakes, I thought. But the lighted candle pointed upward.

“We ought to sing some Christmas carols,” I said. I thought if we sung it would make us feel better. Hank always loved to sing. It would make me feel better to hear his fine baritone voice.

“I can’t remember any Christmas carols,” Hank said.

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “You know all the Christmas carols.” I started humming “Silent Night” and then begun singing it. But Hank didn’t join in. I sung the first verse and stopped.

“We should have an organ,” I said.

“We couldn’t even afford a mouth harp,” Hank said.

“I wish you had kept your banjo,” I said.

“Ma made me give it up when I got saved,” Hank said.

“You’ll have to get another one,” I said.

Hank looked toward the front door and fear come on his face.

“What is it?” I said.

He pointed to the door and I seen a tongue of black water
reaching over the threshold. It was in the shape of a bib spreading on the floor.

“It’s just water from the porch,” I said.

“That is the creek coming into the house,” Hank said.

“Put something under the door,” I said. I run to get an old blanket from the bedroom and stuffed it along the bottom of the door, the way you would to stop a draft. Water soaked through the blanket quick.

“Won’t do no good,” Hank said.

“What will?” I said. We couldn’t open the door, for that would only let in more rain. Rain must be blowing right across the porch, I thought. But all I heard was steady rain on the roof.

“Nothing,” Hank said. I looked at him, and listened. And then I heard the lips sound, the kissing sound and sucking that rising water makes when it touches a building or rock wall.

“You mean that’s creek water?” I said. Gap Creek had rose out of its banks and crossed the road. In the dark it had reached into the yard and licked against the porch, then swirled up onto the boards of the porch and was now pouring under the door. Hank looked so worried I felt sorry for him. I tried to think of something to stop the water from coming into the house. I grabbed a lamp and run to look at the back door, for I thought it was lower than the front. But I had only took one step into the kitchen when my foot hit something thick. There was a splash and I seen water already standing on the kitchen floor.